Citroens are an acquired taste. For over fifty years their quirkiness and idiosyncracies have meant that only the adventurous find out how good they are. I became a Citroen man immediately upon buying my first ever Citroen, an AX 14TZS (I really wanted a GT but only two-door versions were available at the time and the family insisted).

It was the best car I ever owned. Suddenly all those Citroen oddities made sense; the single-spoke steering wheel, for instance. I had always thought of it as a gimmick but use one and you realise that now your thumbs can roam unrestricted around the wheel.

The AX turned out to be the perfect Q-car - named after the Q-ships of the First World War, merchant ships fitted with hidden guns that could blast a submarine out of the water. In the same way, the TZS looked so ordinary, without the give-away spoilers and deep splitter of the GT, but it was nearly as quick and handled just as well. Many are the boy racers who were left gasping at the lights as my little red bomb disappeared into the distance.

It weighed almost nothing, you see. The bonnet was so thin that you had to guard it to prevent it being dented by some idiot sitting on it. The rear door was hung on the rear glass, without supports and, as a result, too enthusiastic a slamming of the tailgate would result in the window smashing and the door hanging forlornly from it’s lock. All was forgiven because it was so good to drive.

They raced AXs in France and it was like a renaissance of the mini days of the sixties - hordes of little screamers fighting to be into the corner first. That surely must have been so much fun as to be worth making illegal. The end came far too soon for me.

Citroen replaced the AX with the Saxo, much closer to the Peugeot vision of normality and so much more boring too. In England, some fool drove his Jaguar out of a side street and mangled my TZS beyond repair. All good things come to an end sooner or later, I suppose.

But that little car made a Citroen man of me. I’d never have believed it thirty years ago but now, given the choice, I’d buy Citroen every time. How the mighty are fallen…